During its pre-Russian revolution period (1882-1917), The Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society (RIOPS) opened its schools in the Levant and a Teacher's College at Nazareth (TCN), and used to send its best students to the theological seminaries and academies at The Russian Empire. We focus on the works, careers and fates of some of these envoys who received their education at Ukraine, which was a part of The Russian Empire till 1917. Mikhail Naimy, one of the pillars of modern Arabic literature, described his life in Poltava in his journal and has devoted his poem to its local river. In 1964, inspired by his recent visit to Ukraine and the celebration of 125 anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko, the famous Ukrainian writer and poet, Naimy translated his poem into Arabic and has written a chapter about him in the collection of articles "In The New Sieve" (1972). Konstantin Kenazi, upon graduation from Kyiv Theological Seminary, devoted himself to teaching at TCN, contributing to RIOPS schools through his tireless pedagogical activities. Some of the RIOPS remained in Ukraine till their last days. Tawfiq Kezma (Kyiv Theological Seminary and Kyiv Theological Academy (KTA)) became an Arabic, Turkish, and Persian studies professor at Kyiv University has written comprehensive Arabic grammar book, numerous articles about Russian and Soviet orientalists, and has translated Arabic literary and historical works into the Ukrainian language. There were also RIOPS graduates of the KTA who have chosen another career. Raphael Hawaweeny became a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, vicar of the Northern-American diocese, and the Antiochian Levantine Christian head mission. He is numbered among the saints by the Orthodox Church in America. Alexander Takhan used to serve as a Greek Orthodox patriarch of Antioch (1928-1958. Several KTA graduates (Habib, Hallaby, Yared, Kleli) have developed critical theological theories and topics in their theses defended at Kyiv. Through their literary, academic, and translation works and church activities, the Levant graduates from the Ukrainian religious schools have contributed to the closeness of these areas' people, strengthening their political, social, and cultural relations and reinforcing the Orthodoxy in the Arab world and outside of it. They have also contributed to the world's Middle Eastern and religious studies (Makhamid 2002, Kochubei 1978, Suhkhova, n.d., Khomitska, 2015, Petrova, 2015, Tarasova, 2002).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Soviet archives, scholars in the United States began producing new comparative scholarship challenging the boundaries of traditional Cold War area studies (Meyer 2014; Tuna 2015; Khalid 2015). Though work by a new generation of historians, including Samuel J. Hirst’s scholarship on Turkish and Soviet diplomatic and cultural relations during the 1920s and 1930s and James H. Meyer’s research on Turkish students at KUTV, represent important new directions in Russian and Eurasian history, the literary and cultural dimensions of Turkish and Soviet entanglements is yet to be explored. This paper seeks to supplement this gap by tracing the literary and artistic itinerary of the playwright, critic, and caricature artist Abidin Dino (1913-1993) who worked as a set designer (khudozhnik) at Lenfilm from 1934-1937 under the patronage of the influential Soviet film director Sergei Yutkevich. After his return to Turkey in 1938 (via Paris), Dino joined the Turkish Communist Party and emerged as an influential writer in the leftist literary magazines of the period. Through a study of his essays in the journals Yeni S.E.S and Yeni Edebiyat and his controversial paintings about the Balikesir ewers made during the First Country Tour of artists in 1939, this paper argues that Dino’s turn to Turkish folk poetry and handicrafts cannot be understood independently of his work with filmic faktura (including “textures and materials of set design but also its objects,” as Emma Widdis has suggested) at Lenfilm. Through a comparative reading of Dino’s writings and Soviet Eastern films of the period, I show that the tactile Orientalism of Soviet cinema had a distinct influence on Dino’s modernist socialist realist aesthetics. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of Dino’s involvement with peasant theater during his exile in Adana from 1943-1945, demonstrating that Dino’s later writings moved beyond this Orientalism, opening new directions for socialist realist aesthetics both within and beyond Turkey.

Addressing a subject that has hitherto been largely ignored in modern western scholarship, the paper is concerned with the politics of Turkic and its relation to Persian in early modern Iran on the one hand, and with its role in political theology at the time, on the other hand. It focuses on the first half of the eighteenth century, and argues that, in addition to new venues in political ideology, geopolitics and religious politics, the end of the Safavids and the rise of the Afshar also meant experimentation with new language ideologies, i.e., popular assumptions about the social role and prestige of a given language. Analyzing some of the poetry of a largely unknown poet who used the nom de plume “Nash’a,” and drawing on additional evidence from lexicography and archival materials, I will demonstrate that Turkophone litterateurs of the time tried to make connections with what they knew as the two main strands of Turkic literature, the Turkmen and Chaghatay Turkic traditions, which they felt connected them to the tribal traditions of the Qizilbash—the Turkmen who had been the military backbone of the Safavid army—and to the prestige of Timurid culture. Aside from the increased interest on the part of Turkophone literati and their patrons in the poetry of Timurid literati like Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (1441-1501), this also meant a conscious reinterpretation of these Turkic literary traditions and their adaptation to new purposes. In addition to the resurfacing of conversion myths and mytho-genealogies, such as the Oghuznama, that had characterized the period prior to the Safavids, we also see attempts at presenting Nava’i as a Shiite poet, which, although contrary to historical facts, underlines the importance of Turkic literature as part of political theology in the period. On a broader level, the paper will contribute to our understanding of how Turkic as a literary subculture could coexist with the prestigious Persian literary tradition prior to modernity.

Guided by postcolonial perspectives, scholars of Ottoman and Turkish studies have inquired into historical, political, and cultural manifestations of a notion of Ottoman imperialism. In particular, these perspectives have helped to delineate a late Ottoman mindset grounded in a colonial paradigm of civilization toward the empire’s Arab lands and subjects. In my paper, I argue that this dynamic can be clarified by looking at the emergence of a new literary epistemology in the late imperial setting. As the focal point of my analysis, I revisit the 1898 debate between Bahai Efendi, Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, and Mustafa Sabri on “the uses of Arab sciences,” which has attracted scholarly attention due to its enactment of a clash between secularism and Islamism. Focusing on understudied themes of this debate, I show how conflicting figurations of “language,” “literature,” “aesthetics,” and “translation” across this debate help us measure the turn-of-the-century transformations in Ottoman letters against the late imperial politics. To this end, I examine connections and contestations across the discursive field that ranges from the quarrel between Bahai Efendi and Yalçın about “the Arab sciences” on the pages of Ṭarіḳ to Sabri’s polemic against the latter to Yalçın’s S̠ervet-i Funūn treatises on the notion of aesthetics. Juxtaposing these attempts to define and redefine the contours of literary and aesthetic production and reception in the late Ottoman Empire, I make a case for the emergence of a new politics of aesthetics in the Ottoman cultural field. Critically engaging with this series of literary and epistemological transformations in the late Ottoman Empire, I further argue, enables us to see often-overlooked entanglements of orientalist, westernist, and nationalist dispositions within the project of Ottoman modernization as well as helps us reach a more nuanced understanding of “the secular” within this framework. In conclusion, I probe how Yalçın’s and Sabri’s later careers expose the very limits of these transformations in relation to the early twentieth-century cultural atmosphere in Turkey and the wider Middle East.